That sounds about right. It was called 'management through walking around', and he got up in people's faces and demanded they perform better and compete with each other. He was the arbiter, and fickle, but he wasn't trying to get people to be subservient.
Guy Kawasaki described it as, Jobs was so confident he brought a guy into Apple who took the company away from him. He was so full of himself it was impossible for him to be in any way threatened by capable subordinates no matter HOW good they were: he'd just bully them and be mercurial and try to get their maximum performance out of them.
So in a sense, it was all the other people. Not him.
And in another sense, it took a very unusual person to be able to do that, and be constantly outclassed, and not begin to act defensively. There's a cost to it: Apple was doing the Newton way way before there were cellphones and such. Jobs wasn't that wise, just impossibly audacious, and as such he did manage to operate a team of exceptional people. He wasn't the team, but as far as a leader being the leader, he was about as intense as Gordon Ramsay, and absolutely he let the people around him shine: to him, that WAS him looking good.
And it wouldn't make you safe from criticism for even five minutes, but he did love it when people around him were great. Jobs was the 'A players hire A players. B players hire C players. You hired THAT GUY?' manager. He not only expected people around him to excel, he literally demanded it.
"Management through walking around" comes from Hewlett-Packard. At least as practiced by at Packard and Hewlett, it was supposedly more about learning from individual contributors in labs and on factory floors -- without only getting information filtered through middle management -- not "getting up in people's faces and demanding they perform better."
Guy Kawasaki described it as, Jobs was so confident he brought a guy into Apple who took the company away from him. He was so full of himself it was impossible for him to be in any way threatened by capable subordinates no matter HOW good they were: he'd just bully them and be mercurial and try to get their maximum performance out of them.
So in a sense, it was all the other people. Not him.
And in another sense, it took a very unusual person to be able to do that, and be constantly outclassed, and not begin to act defensively. There's a cost to it: Apple was doing the Newton way way before there were cellphones and such. Jobs wasn't that wise, just impossibly audacious, and as such he did manage to operate a team of exceptional people. He wasn't the team, but as far as a leader being the leader, he was about as intense as Gordon Ramsay, and absolutely he let the people around him shine: to him, that WAS him looking good.
And it wouldn't make you safe from criticism for even five minutes, but he did love it when people around him were great. Jobs was the 'A players hire A players. B players hire C players. You hired THAT GUY?' manager. He not only expected people around him to excel, he literally demanded it.